Abstract

HERNANDEZ LANDA VALENCIA, Verónica. Femme Fatales Defying Status Quo. A Study of Three Hispanic Novels and their Film Adaptation. Valenciana [online]. 2021, vol.14, n.27, pp.35-64.  Epub Apr 23, 2021. ISSN 2007-2538.  https://doi.org/10.15174/rv.v13i27.539.

The femme fatale has been studied as a figure in art used by men artists to stigmatize and subjugate all women who rebelled against the statu quo throughout history. However, femme fatale has also been used to point out the weaknesses, hypocrisies, decadence and authoritarianism of the patriarchal system where it is set. This paper aims to explore the character’s ambivalent function, by contrasting three novels in which the femme fatale becomes the axis of conflict in the plot, and the proposals to resignify its meaning by film adaptations. These are Hispanic novels published in the last third of the twentieth century: Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, by Mario Vargas Llosa, Sultry Moon, by Mempo Giardinelli, and The Ages of Lulu, by Almudena Grandes; and their respective adaptations directed by Francisco Lombardi, Roberto Denis and Bigas Luna. This comparison focuses in the analysis of the topos of a powerful sexuality that leads to ruin. In order to study this figure, the paper proposes a conceptualization of the topos that allows to visualize its rhetorical function and its capability to adapt and resignify itself in every discourse. This proposal seeks not only to highlight the ambivalence and transgressive potential of the femme fatale, but also to promote the rhetorical analysis in the study of topoi and thematized characters in literary tradition.

Keywords : Femme fatale; Rhetoric; Novel; Cinema; Topoi.

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